Culturally Aware Intelligent Learning Environments for Resource-Poor Countries

This paper presents current work being done on the development of a speech and language technology (SLT) based intelligent tutoring system for coaching young learners from a Caribbean context in developing literacy skills. The system uses speech recognition, socio-cultural modelling and educational technology techniques that aim to enable two-way, dynamic communication between a young reader and the synthetic SLT tutor. Two goals of the research are to firstly model a reader computationally from instructional and socio-cultural perspectives, and secondly to create speech models that capture the unique linguistic variations and pronunciations expressed by young readers in Trinidad and Jamaica in particular.